Notes from my memoirs.

#1
Leaving London

“This town has nothing of the beauty, the history, the life of a great city.” I sighed to a buddy one day last year. I find the faux-tranquility of the English countryside almost emasculating, when contrasted with the pulsating heart of a great city, sprawling across miles of land and encompassing millions of stories. I spent the first ten years of my life in one of the world’s great cities; London, although perhaps I’m uneducated to qualify that statement, because I’ve never been to Rome or Tokyo or New York. Ah, New York, that great melting pot. Full of life as any city, one can view New York as it is in Manhattan with its cool urban beauty, home of artists and thinkers, or the nightmarish image of the city as a cesspit of corruption, immorality and self-interest depicted in Taxi Driver. The truth can never be mutually exclusive in such a place, but it would be unwise to use the latter description to promote tourism.

I’ve held a distaste for patriotism and tradition for as long as I can remember, and being in that big city for much of my formative years must have shaped that sensibility, somehow. In my time living in a quiet Surrey town, I felt adrift amidst the overwhelmingly bland vibe of Conservative (capital and small ‘c’) churchgoers and their financial comfort; people who watch Top Gear instead of the news. I yearned for the inner-city smog. As those versed in cliché say; diversity is the spice of life and, furthermore, the more blue-collar the area, the easier it is to score drugs.

#2
Creative Explorations

My interest in the arts has proved to be inescapable. As a child I read War & Peace in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. However, the tea had cooled and gone rather sour by the end of the decade. Later, I dabbled in the Gonzo journalist movement, crafting a work that was compared contemporaneously to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Its critical acclaim was regretfully not equalled with the general public. It failed to secure a wide release, as I had, in fact, taken a large quantity of hallucinogens in lieu of actually writing the novel.

#3
The Good Morning Vietnam

This was the band I was a part of between 2009 and 2012, although we were always more of an abstract concept than an actual, practising musical unit. We weren’t, however, always named after a film I’d never seen; the formative discussions of the band produced the name Equinox, prior to our adoption of the moniker Ian Baxter’s Love Train and, towards the end of our fractured tenure, our music teacher often introduced our appearances at school concerts simply as “Jack Frayne-Reid,” which always made me very self-conscious.

At the time of our first live appearance, we were perpetually “looking for a singer,” particularly as our supposed frontman, Jonn, had no desire to deliver our unlistenable version of I Am the Walrus. At this point we realised that I had always been the vocalist of the group, even though it would be over a year before I could deliver a remotely worthwhile performance and, with Dom on guitar and Timmy on drums, our first show was mired by the sound-mixing ‘suggestions’ of the music department, which rendered our guitars inaudible. Almost immediately, we fired our keyboard player.

Although we seldom strayed from our repertoire of cover songs, which consisted almost entirely of the Beatles, Neil Young and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, we soon developed a reputation for giving far less of a fuck than any other musicians in the school scene, primarily due to our fondness of spending at least ten minutes on any given song (we’d often trick the organisers into letting us play two songs under the pretence that one was a solo acoustic song by me) and to play louder than any of our more technically-gifted peers. We had a great feel, but all of us were too caught up in our own lives and musical interests to ever actually become a cohesive group. I regret this.

#4
My Eventual Death

It’s a natural tenet of humanity to be afraid of death, but at this point I’ve amassed a greater number of reasons to fear life. Life carries a great number of stresses and conflicts and, as an atheist, I believe that death is nothingness, which means that, while sentience will have, unfortunately, long passed me by, at least I’ll never have to hear another Nickelback song. If there is a hell, the most ludicrous conceptual excuse for innate human guilt, I’m certainly destined for there – not just because of God’s insecurity-founded insistence on sentencing anybody who doubts his existence to eternal damnation, but because of the numerous bad things I will presumably have done by the time I die. While I am not certain as to the exact nature of these acts, I’m working on it.

It would be nice to seek solace in religion. A friend, although not a close one, recently became a Mormon, seemingly out of the blue. Another friend theorised that it was to fill a gap in his existence, and I suppose it’s a more savoury way of seeking existential security than hiring a prostitute or becoming an addict. Mormonism is frequently victim to condescension from all angles; due to its age, it is seen as infinitely more ridiculous than its predecessor, Christianity, which espouses the idea of virgin birth. Yet, I see it as somewhat inspiring that this guy was willing to completely reconcile himself with the baggage carried by his sect in favour of a blissful eternity with its muscle-bound Jesus. The constant demand for a percentage of the worshipper’s money is certainly to the detriment of his religion’s public image, but even wealth can’t silence the reaper’s toll, except, seemingly, for Rupert Murdoch. Besides, few religions can be described as a genuine non-profit organisation; just look at Catholic architecture, or their legal defence fund.

So, I will die and, bullshit to this piece’s first paragraph, I am scared by the spectre of my looming mortality. If life were optional, I’m not sure I’d even have taken it, because death’s a pretty big catch in the whole deal.  If I end up signing out with bounds of loving friends and relatives surrounding my deathbed (which I think is a sort of 50/50 chance), it worries me that I’ll be a colossal pain in the ass for all of them. Whilst I’m a great silent sufferer, I’m even better at the verbal kind.

The day’s too fast,
You can try & slow it down,
But that won’t make you last.